Salinger's Letters

by Nils Schou

  Nora had formulated most of the rules that would keep us from getting on each other’s nerves. She is almost obsessive when it comes to the rules of social intercourse and can discuss social codes for hours. In fact, this is the topic of all her plays, films, newspaper articles and books.

  How to devise the rules and regulations that would regulate our interaction and keep us from getting fed up with each other or flying at each other’s throats? That was the question. Some of us already knew writers. We had got to know others during the years we had been in business.

  Nora drew up a long list of questions upon which her code of conduct would be based. Are writers more self-centred than other people? Yes, one would hope so. Vanity is the fuel that drives all writers. Are writers more combative than other people? Yes, one would hope so. Conflict lies at the core of all literature. Are writers more unlikable than other people? No, they don’t have to be in order to survive. Are writers’ egos bigger than other people’s? One would hope so for their sake. Are writers better company than other people? No, they’re just like anybody else. Some are fun, some are dull.

  Nora answered all the questions herself and came up with the following rules:

  We must not see each other socially.

  We must not be friends with each other’s families.

  We must not under any circumstances have sex with each other.

  We must never advise each other.

  We must never divulge information about each other to anyone.

  Of course we broke these rules frequently over the years but in principle we were in agreement.

  Our collaboration at the Factory was going so well that all four of us were eager to safeguard it.

  Of course we were friends with each other’s families, but we rationed it. If one of us had a project that was going badly we would not normally ask each other for help, but there were exceptions just as there were when it came to personal problems. When a problem had reached the proportions of a stumbling block we could make an exception and turn to the others.

  Nora called her rules Sympathy Management.

  The Factory was to continue to be what it was, a factory, a factory for the production of letters, words, sentences, a fiction factory. Puk was the only one who primarily wrote non-fiction books, essays and journalism. The Factory’s core product was fiction.

  All the rules, regulations, precautionary measures and weekly meetings were originally devised to keep us from getting on each other’s nerves. Then when the Factory had been in existence for a number of years we expanded into an area none of us had imagined at the start. The rule not to divulge information about each other to third parties became a legally binding confidentiality agreement. Puk was the best known of us and the one who knew everyone who was anyone in intellectual and artistic circles. She began to receive feelers from publishers and writers. Could she read a manuscript completely anonymously and give an opinion as to what could be done to save it? A businessman wanted to write his autobiography and was willing to pay Puk to help him in secret. A best-selling author had had a breakdown. Could Puk confidentially help the publisher finish her last novel? Puk was offered so much work of that kind that she started dividing it up between the three of us without telling anyone.

  We got the system up and running risk-free and the offers for covert work kept pouring in. So did the payments.

  All four of us worked hard. We liked working. We liked making money. The confidential work was often fun because the secrecy involved imparted a certain sense of freedom. The fact that it was so well paid made it even more fun of course. Anonymity can be a great spur to creativity.

  Everything went through Puk. She divided the jobs among us. The first speeches she was commissioned to write she wrote herself: after dinner speeches, birthday speeches, funeral elegies. The demand for speeches she had written was so great that she started passing commissions to the rest of us. If the speech was supposed to be funny, Nora got it. If it was supposed to be emotional, Boris got it. If it was going to be given by someone with a mental disorder I got it.

  This kind of work sometimes involved a personal meeting, which always took place in the Botanical Gardens, the park on the other side of the street. The Gardens were originally Boris’ idea. Anything that could get his creative spark fired up appealed to him. Basically all four of us were producers of fiction.

  The Botanical Gardens was the obvious setting for all kinds of fiction, fantasies, dreams, play. We became ardent supporters of the Botanical Gardens. Boris was the first and wrote a collection of poems about them. Nora wrote a romantic novel in which all the illicit encounters took place there. Puk discussed the garden as an image of order and harmony. I restricted myself to making a depression study of the garden.

  A Botanical Garden with all its plants has an effect on a certain kind of depression. When I wander through the garden my depression barometer clearly registers fluctuations. My story was called ‘The Botanic Gardens Seen through the Eyes of a Depressed Person’. As soon as it was finished I stuffed it into my desk drawer; I write about depression as little as possible.

  On the rare occasions when we wrote messages or letters to each other over the years our favorite topics were 1) the Botanical Gardens and 2) our guardian angels. It started out as a game and later we toyed with the idea of collaborating on a book, ‘Tales of the Botanical Gardens’.

  On the bulletin board in the kitchen were pictures of our four guardian angels, Warhol, Monroe, Hemingway, and Amanda. Next to them photos of the Botanical Gardens began to appear regularly. We vied with each other to know the most about the garden and its plants.

  We didn’t spend much time together except when we were collaborating on a project, either a TV series or a film. This was something we looked forward to although we were all in agreement that our being together needed to be rationed.

  Boris somewhat grandly called it the ‘love diet’.

  Nora said, ‘If I spend too much time with you guys I get talent constipation.’

  Puk said, ‘We have to be able to stand each other all our lives.’

  I said nothing. Mostly because I hadn’t thought of anything worth saying.

  When we weren’t on the diet we got to work at 8 a.m. and left at 5 p.m. We sat in the kitchen or, in Boris’ case, stretched out on the floor. In the middle of the day we took a stroll in the Botanical Gardens.

  Boris was Ernest Hemingway, the macho writer with the built-in bullshit detector. Puk was Andy Warhol, a machine pumping out literary products on the assembly line. Nora was Marilyn Monroe, soft and beautiful whose only aim was to please. I was Amanda, my depression.

  Amanda had long since become an intimate acquaintance of the other three. Not only did they know a great deal about her, they also held her in high esteem.

  There was a very simple reason. Every time we ran out of gas and the way ahead looked blocked, one of them would always say, ‘What does Amanda say?’ When Amanda couldn’t provide an immediate answer she and I crossed the street to the Botanical Gardens and wandered around for as long as it took.

  For reasons that seemed mysterious to me at the time, and still seem mysterious, Amanda always came up with an answer. The answer was not always the solution to our problems but it invariably set a reaction off in one of us that led to the right solution.

  Monroe, Warhol and Hemingway were always willing to contribute but they couldn’t touch Amanda.

  Puk had an explanation. The three guardian angels all had depression; Amanda was depression itself.

  SIX

  The Telephone Rings on Strandboulevarden

  At Nordisk Kollegium there were student societies you could join. Two law students I played soccer with put me up for membership of the society called The Cup.

  The associations occasionally held soccer tournaments against each other. One evening during one such tournament I was called to the phone during the break. ‘Dan Moller! Dan Moller to the phone!’

  ‘Dan Moller? I�
��d like to speak to Dan Moller.’

  ‘Speaking.’

  A voice I didn’t know was on the other end.

  ‘Are you Dan Thorvald Moller?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘My name is Beate.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘We met last time at the funeral.’

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  ‘I’m Ib Schroder’s daughter.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have five daughters?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four daughters, three sons and how many wives?’

  ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You sound just as annoying as you look.’

  ‘Now I know who you are. You’re the youngest daughter, the one that lived with Schroder in the apartment on Vester Voldgade.’

  ‘Have you ever been here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My father said you were depressed like him.’

  ‘Not wasn’t depressed. I am depressed.’

  ‘God, you’re annoying. Are you always wagging your finger at somebody?’

  ‘Yes, actually. How did you guess?’

  ‘I know your type. A couple of them are my teachers at High School.’

  ‘I remember you. You’re the one that looks like a boy.’

  ‘No, that’s my sister. I’m the one that looks like a dog.’

  ‘I think that was a supposed to be a joke, right?’

  ‘My father said you’re totally devoid of a sense of humor. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, but I try to laugh in the right places.’

  ‘My brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and mothers are ransacking the apartment. If you want to see the papers my father told you about, you better get over here soon.’

  ‘When can I come?’

  ‘Come tonight if you can. It’s ok if it’s late. I can’t sleep anyway, I’m so furious at my sisters and brothers. They’re hauling away all the furniture and paintings. You don’t have a shotgun, do you?’

  ‘Sure I’ve got a shotgun, right here in the dorm. I’ll take it with me and mow down your sisters and brothers with pellets.’

  ‘That was almost funny, Dan.’

  ‘Unintentionally.’

  Just before midnight I leaned my bike against the wall of the apartment building on Vester Voldgade where Schroder used to live.

  When I reached the fifth floor the door was open. I went in. A girl who did in fact look like a boy came out into the hall. She stretched out her hand and I shook it.

  ‘Beate Schroder,’ she said.

  ‘Dan Moller.’

  ‘So that’s what you look like.’

  ‘Didn’t you say you’d seen me before?’

  ‘No, I never said that.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you before either.’

  ‘How can I be sure you’re Dan Moller?’

  ‘I took my passport with me as well as the shotgun, of course.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘22. How old are you?’

  ‘I’ll be 18 soon.’

  ‘In other words you’re 17.’

  ‘Are you always so annoying in that particularly infuriating way?’

  ‘No, I’ve got a lot of different ways of being annoying.’

  ‘When will you graduate from dental school?’

  ‘In two years.’

  ‘I’ll be starting there in the fall.’

  ‘Isn’t your mother a dentist too? A professor in Stockholm, right?’

  ‘So you do know who I am.’

  ‘Your father said you’re the child that resembles him most.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that I’m the opposite of depressed.’

  ‘What’s the opposite of depressed?’

  ‘You should be the first to know.’

  ‘I do know. I’d just like to hear the words you use.’

  ‘I’m happy. I’ve decided to be happy all my life.’

  ‘I think that’s an extremely sensible decision.’

  ‘Come into the dining room. I’ve got all my father’s papers together for you.’

  The light was on in all the rooms. The apartment was almost empty.

  The dining room was piled with papers and letters, all written by hand with a fountain pen.

  Schroder’s daughter explained: ‘All of it’s about depression. I tried reading some of it, but I didn’t understand a word. The letters are part of his correspondence with someone abroad, they’re almost all about depression.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything. My father decided you should be allowed to look through it.’

  ‘Did you speak to him about it?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me he was going to kill himself.’

  She turned on her heel and left the room.

  I took off my jacket, hung it on the back of a chair and went to work.

  Schroder had written about depression on all different kinds of paper. A lot if it was jotted down on small scraps, often on the back of bills from the grocer, the butcher or the fish store. In addition there were small notebooks he had filled with his thoughts on the subject. He had sorted the letters by sender, and bundled and bound them together with a rubber band.

  In the light of the large chandelier I set out to see if I could find some kind of system. I couldn’t. All I could do was plunge in at some arbitrary point. It was obvious how these scraps had come into existence: Schroder had an idea while he was in a shop. To make sure he didn’t forget he had jotted it down. The handwriting was often illegible but gradually I got to know it so well I could read it.

  Shortly after 4 a.m. I left the apartment. I didn’t know where his daughter was.

  The next night I came back, shortly before midnight again. Beate was packing. We only exchanged a few words.

  I kept this up for a week until I had a good, general idea of what was in the papers.

  Every word was about something that had occupied me 24 hours a day for my entire life. I was in familiar territory, but I still had to reread much of it a number of times before I could begin to make out even the barest outline.

  I needed to mobilise everything I had discussed with Schroder in order to understand his terminology. We had talked about pharmacology and corrective jaw surgery, but mostly we had discussed depression for hours on end.

  He was a generation older than I, and had given the subject much more thought than I had, but I had come up with some ideas that interested him. My description of the kind of depression I suffered from didn’t correspond to his own, but there were elements that overlapped and the terminology I used to describe it intrigued him.

  One day, walking down Norrebrogade, we had tossed around the idea of collaborating on a study of the kind of depression he called signal depression. He believed it was what we both suffered from.

  Now that he was dead and I sat there reading the papers he had left behind it was as if I could hear him saying, ‘It’s up to you now to carry out our plans, Dan. I’m sorry I couldn’t go the distance. Use whatever you can here, my papers, my thoughts, my life.’

  During the weekends when I didn’t have any classes to go to, I spent all of Saturday and Sunday in the apartment on Vester Voldgade.

  Schroder’s other children took turns dropping in with their spouses and fighting with Beate. They yelled and screamed and accused each other of the most heinous things. Cups and plates flew through the air in the kitchen. Now and then someone came running through the dining room where I was sitting.

  At first they would comment on me. ‘Who the hell is that guy over there?’

  They didn’t wait for an answer but continued to ransack and raid.

  A woman who introduced herself as Ib Schroder’s Wife Number Three waved to me and called, ‘If you find any letters from me, then for God’s sake hurry up and destroy them.’


  ‘Why?’

  ‘I used to write him pornographic letters he could masturbate to when I was on a business trip. So he wouldn’t be unfaithful.’

  An older brother dashed through the dining room saying, ‘I’m David, I couldn’t get you to kill Beate, could I?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She thinks she’s an only child and the old man’s sole heir.’

  ‘The old man being Ib Schroder?’

  ‘I am so furious at him for committing suicide.’

  Late Sunday night I was alone in the apartment. Beate had gone to the movies with her boyfriend.

  All the papers pertaining to what Schroder had called signal depression lay in a pile in front of me.

  Most of it had been written long before we met. Nevertheless it was as though a lot of it had been written directly to me. The ‘you’ he was writing to could easily have been myself. He was striving hard to understand it. He simplified. He made diagrams, explaining it as if to a child. As he said.

  It was not a full-fledged theory of depression. It was an attempt to establish a foundation for a theory.

  I had been so deeply engrossed by his papers for such a long time that I seemed to hear him talking to me directly. He was confident I understood every word he said.

  I quickly wrote down my own comments on the theories he had come up with. I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice Beate had come home. When she put her hand on my shoulder I was so startled I dropped my pen.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  That’s ok. How was the movie?’

  ‘I didn’t see much of it because my boyfriend and I were making out most of the time.’

  ‘You have the whole apartment to make out in. Why do it at the movies?’

  ‘There! That’s exactly what my father would have said! And you said it exactly the same way!’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘It’s just an observation.’

  ‘Were you fond of your father?’

  ‘I loved my father. I still love him.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Why is it terrible?’

  ‘You love your father and now he’s dead.’

  ‘It’s not you it’s terrible for, it’s me,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Maybe that was what I was trying to say.’